In-depth look: Brightspot 4.5 in action

Speaker 1: right, don't think. All right. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for being here at this session. I really appreciate that you've taken the time out of your day to come and spend this next 40 minutes or so with me. Um and actually for the next 40 minutes what we'll be doing here is I'm going to give you an early look at the new features coming in. Bright spot version 4.5. Were planning to ship this version of the platform in in April and I'm really excited to give you a sneak peek. All right, a quick intro before I go further and we have I haven't met yet MEREDITH Radke I am R S V P of the platform product management team here at bright spot Again, This session is designed to give you an overview of as many features in version 4.5 as I could fit into 40 minutes. Um I do want to mention though that if you see something in this session that piques your interest, a lot of the other sessions throughout the day and today and tomorrow we'll dive more in detail to see in more in detail to some of these features. So definitely check out the full conference agenda if you see something today that looks interesting. All right, Just a quick overview of what I plan to show over the next 40 minutes or so. Um I'll cover our new editorial content types feature which lets admin and editorial users create content types directly in the CMS. I'll show off some of our new page management features um as well as our latest iteration of production guides or in CMS health. I will also go through a couple of our new integrations and show off what's new in bright spot assignment desk. Before I start, I do want to introduce you to a trio of users that you're gonna see throughout the sessions during the conference. Uh these three users and personas are designed to represent the three types of users that we see uh for our customers. So let's meet them. First up we have Alan, our admin user, he's responsible for setting up new sites and integrations, creating analytics, dashboards, managing permissions and workflows and creating new editorial content types, which I'll show here in a few minutes. Next up we have Margot, our editor, Mark Cargo is responsible for managing the homepage and other site pages as well as making assignments and planning out content for the site and her team. And then last but obviously not least we have Eva our writer today, Evil will be drafting new content and relying pretty heavily on some of our new integrations as well as some of our collaboration tools in order to do our job and use the CMS. So with those introductions made, let's go ahead and get into the demo. I'll start working today as Alan are bright spots CMS Admin user. The first task Alan needs to do today is create a brand new content type for his editorial team. They'll do that by using bright spots, new editorial content types feature which are located in admin content types here. Before I go further, you might be wondering what is an editorial content type. Exactly. So let's start there. An editorial content type is a content type that is created by an editor or an admin user using this here. The CMS Ui This is in contrast to the traditional content types, you're probably familiar with, the ones that are back in Engineer writes in java. This is something our customers have been asking about for many years. So I'm going to walk through this feature in detail. We believe it's a pretty big game changer. All right, Alan needs to create a new content type called white paper so that his editorial team can begin drafting content and gathering assets to support the design and production of these PDFs. To start he will give the new content type a name white paper and add a simple field. I will go ahead and just start with a text field called title and save as soon as this content type is done saving, we'll actually see this new content type white paper in the CMS note that this brand new content type white paper just has that one feel that we added title. His editorial team is probably going to need a bit more to work with. So let's go back and add some more fields to the content type. Next up, the editorial team has asked for a body field. So let's go ahead and select rich text field and name it body text. Since this is a rich text field, Allen can also select which rich text editor is available. He'll select the large rich text toolbar which includes the full set of bright spots editing tools including formatting and beds and track changes. I'll pause here actually and run through a few of the additional options that Alan can set on this field. He can give this body text field a note. You can also set character account minimums and maximums as well as suggested minimums and maximums. These are hard limits and the suggested minimum and maximum our soft warnings. He can also make fields required. Different fields may have different settings than what I've shown here but those are the most common. Next we'll add a bowling field called urgent. So the team can indicate whether or not this asset is urgent. Next he'll add a few reference fields. Think of reference fields as how you connect or link to different content types. So the team can add tags to this white paper. He'll call this field tags and let them associate many tags and then let them pick the content type tag. Finally, Allen knows that his team may want to upload documents to this white paper. So he will add a file field called associated files. Note that if necessary. Alan can also organize these fields into clusters or tabs giving him more control over how the editorial uI is laid out. This is a pretty simple content type. So Alan won't use every available field seen here but it will highlight a few others. First we have date field which will add a calendar or a date picker field to the content type such as for a due date. The number field will add a text field that only accepts numerical characters. For example, if the editorial team wanted to include a proposed number of pages, they could use a number field. The select field will allow for the setting of a choice. A good example of a select field would be a size drop down something like small medium or large. There are also more specialized fields such as region location and embedded. But let's move on once Allen saves again. He can immediately go look at the white paper content type within the CMS to make sure that everything is in order. Let's do that. All right. We're able to see the fields that Allen added, including that body text field and it's you I note our urgent toggle our tags and the ability to upload files to this white paper. What Alan has done here with this white paper is essentially to create a back end content store. This use case is actually one we use here ourselves that bright spot our own editorial team uses editorial content types to draft copy and organize collateral for our white papers and e books which are then handed off in a single organized package to our design team. Now that's one way to use editorial content types. But it's not the only way In fact we introduced this feature to support headless use cases where the assets contained in these content types are accessed via A P I. And delivered to a front end or mobile app or some other channel. This allows anyone to create a new content type in bright Spot, enabling editors to start creating content right away. However, there are times when Allen will need help from an engineer, for example, note that our white paper does not have previews. If this content type is needed for display on a front end website, someone will need to create the html CSS and javascript to power it. So let me show you how that can be done. We'll go back to that content Type one more time. Okay, we're again looking at the editorial content type that Allen had created this time. I want to highlight this developer tab and in particular the renderers area. This is where an engineer who has created a front end template can associate either a handlebars file or a template with this content type. This isn't a technical session but I do want to call out while I'm here that the developer tab also includes areas to add interfaces annotations and methods which allow developers to extend the bright spot CMS using javascript. Again, this is not a technical session. But note that I just had javascript, not java. We introduced this capability to allow more engineers whether their back end or for them to be able to modify Bright Spot without the need to know java. These changes can also now be made directly in the CMS without the need for a full deployment process. These changes can be made with a simple safe action. Okay, so back to Alan, he's created this content type and it's looking pretty good. He's not quite finished yet. He also needs to manage the permissions and work clothes for this content type. He will access work clothes via admin workflows and he knows that his team wants the white papers to follow the same workflow as e books. So he'll locate that workflow and simply add white paper. Mhm. To follow this flow as well. Mhm. Note that there's no delay here that white paper content type is immediately available to the bright spot workflow engine. The white paper content type will also be available in the Bright spot permission system. So Alan could manage who has access to create and edit that content type, just like he would any other content type. It's also now available um as a filter in search, he can create notification, subscriptions using that content type and really do anything that you'd expect to be able to do with a content type and bright spot. All right. So to recap on editorial content types. This new feature allows admin or editorial users to create content types directly in the Bright Spot CMS UI without writing codes. These new content types support an array of fields including text, rich text Bolling, reference, file, date and more. And these content types are immediately made available in search to the Bright Spot workflow engine permissions and first and foremost to the editorial teams to start creating content with all that said, Let's move on to our editor Margo and see how she uses some of the new features and bright spot 4.5. Mhm. Today Margot has a lot of work to do around cage management. Page management is another major focus area of new features and bright spot 4.5. I'm now working as Margo to start. She's going to work on the home page. She also needs to create a brand new page from scratch and then she's going to work on some assignments using Bright Spot assignment desk. Let's get started with the homepage. Margo can access the homepage via the Quick start. Widget note that the quick start widget has a couple of start items. This is a new bright Spot feature called favorites. We added the ability to set favorites in the Quick start dashboard widget as well as in name and contextual search fields. To make it easier for users to quickly access the types and assets that they used the most. Alright, let's start editing the homepage. Okay, the first nick Margot needs to do to the homepages, rearrange a few modules. She wants to take these three modules and move them lower on on the page To do that. She'll use a new bright spot 4.5 feature that we call movable, which allows her to select one or many modules and drag and drop to reorder them on the page. We introduced that feature to save teams time and reduce the amount of clicking it takes to rearrange modules on a page. Next she needs to update the description on our user conference module. She'll do that using our new preview to edit capability, which allows users to very quickly hop into modules and update language or imagery. Before she does that though, let's quickly talk about what preview to edit means and why we build it. Prior to version 4.5, we might have seen Margot click through this form on the left to open and find the module in question in order to make her changes. Sometimes that's an easy one or two clicks, but sometimes if modules are very nested, it can mean clicking through multiple levels to find the one she wants to update with preview. Edit Margo is able to navigate the preview experience to quickly hop directly to a desired module. She can do that by clicking this promo overlooked, which takes her directly to this module. She's now looking at this specific promo module and can very easily update the text and title to reflect her changes. Finally, Margo wants to add a new article from the editorial team to the homepage. She'll do that using the shelf. The shelf is this toggle down here. The shelf is another new feature in bright spot 4.5. The goal of the shelf is to give users quick and easy access to recently published content. So we're seeing here recently published assets if she wanted, Margot can also access her saved searches, making it easier than ever to access what she needs. Margo knows that she wants to add this article onto the homepage. She can select actually just this one article or multiple to pull onto the page. Let's go ahead and we'll actually just drop this article as a standalone module onto the page and preview will give it the default look and feel for a promo, let's say though. Instead Margo had wanted to drag that story into the module above it. She can also drag directly into any other module, such as a promo or a list preview will update again and we'll get rid of this older story so that we have the correct number of assets in that module. Alright. Margo is actually done at this point. Everything she needs to do to the homepage so she can go ahead and publish now that the homepage is all set. Margo needs to create a brand new landing page. She'll start to create this page from scratch using our new page builder feature. Let's go ahead and open up a brand new page before Margot begins working with page builder. Let me give you some history on this new feature. This alternate mode is a pretty big departure from our usual form based editing experience. We believe this mode provides new and existing users with a clean, simple way of editing and one that is easy to learn and free of distractions. Let's watch Margot build out this page to start. She'll give it a display name and save next. She will give it a description from here. Margo is ready to start adding modules to this page. What she can do by clicking on the contents link which opens up the module picker from here. She can use any of the available modules but what I want to highlight is this recommended area. Margot is going to use one of the recommended modules. This is a new feature called Style groups. The idea behind style groups is again to make publishing work faster. The idea is if teams tend to use the same handful of modules with the same look and feel over and over again and admin can pre create these modules including starter content and a set look and feel to make the content flow even easier. I'll go ahead and use this feature promo with three sub promos. It is pre configured with some placeholder text for me. Which Margo will go ahead and replace. Mhm. In addition to the title and description, she can replace the starter content With the correct set of assets. I'll grab these three and we'll change the call to action 2.2 that same article and save. All right. Margot is able to get a nice look at that new module. Margo can continue to work with page builder to make edits to this module as needed by clicking the pencil to open any field in this overlay. Next she'll again use page builder to add another module to this page. A shared module she had created earlier in the day. Note that as Margo has added modules to this page, the contents list has thrown. She can click over here to quickly edit the modules on the page as well and if needed, she can return to the original page editing mode to work in this view as well. At this point Margo is really happy with her progress on this page. Looking at her title though, she remembers that she needed to update the in context. Help for the page content type. She can do that by clicking this question mark help icon here in the header. This is bright spots, newest version of production diets or in CMS help. This new version of production guys is designed to be always in context of the content type that a user is looking at it in this case because Margo is on a page she sees the help text or guides that have been populated for the page content type and because she is an admin she can quickly make edits to the production guides right here in context and save that change morrow just made will become immediately available to any other users working in the system the next time they look at the page content type. Mhm. Alright now that Margo's updated the production guides, she can move on to her final task today which is creating a few assignments for her writing staff to work on. She'll use bright spots assignment desk features to accomplish those tasks. If you're not familiar with assignment desk it is our budgeting and creative tracking solution. You can think of assignment desk as helping to plan the creation of content before it even becomes a draft in the CMS. There are three main parts of assignment desk. First there is the pitch content type, We'll go ahead and look at this pitch that Eva had submitted the pitch. Content type includes a title and description as well as an urgent flag. You can think of the pitch as a simple idea that someone wants to write about or create content around. Margo thinks this pitch of Ava's is a pretty good idea so she's going to turn it into an assignment. The assignment content type can be accessed right here from the pitch and is the second component of assignment dusk. Margot just needs to give this assignment a title, due date and a bit of a description so the writer knows what she's expecting. Note that while this is an article assignment, Simon desk also includes other types of assignments such as audio, photo and video. Margo will also assign herself as the editor to this piece and Eva as the writer. This assignment widget also includes a status which will leave us new and displays the email and slack information for these assigned users so that everyone knows how to stay in contact with each other. Should anything come up. Okay that's the assignment Margo will save and the assignment is the second major component of assignment desk. Finally the last major feature of assignment desk is the board view which allows Margo to get a look at what content is being produced across the team. She can access it via search and filters by the assignment content type. If you are familiar with bright spot assignment desk, you may recall that previously this view was only accessible via a separate link under admin And version 4.5. We've relocated the assignment desk dashboard view into this board view and search so that the assignments are accessible right from the main search view where the editors are already working from here. Margo can get a look at the assignments by current status But she's looking at right here. She sees she has 10 new assignments 18 assigned and so on. She can also switch to look at assignments by editor or a shiny. Which she'll do now Once she does that Margo can see right away that Eva has too many articles to write this week. She's got 16 current assignments. This conveniently gives me the opportunity to show you another new feature of this assignment desk board view which is the ability to drag and drop assignments from one column to another. We're really excited about this feature every time we've shown assignment desk to a customer the first question they've asked has been can I drag things from one column to another and now we're able to say yes as you'll see Margo is dragging that assignment from Eva over to brody. That dragon drop will reassign the assignment from Eva to brody and will be captured in the revisions history Widget on the assignment itself with that assignment made. Margot is finished her editing responsibilities for today. She's accomplished a lot. She has updated the homepage using preview to edit on the shelf. She's created a brand new page using page builder. And finally she has created and managed assignments for her writing team. So all that said let's pop in and watch ava use some of the new features in bright spot 4.5. Okay I'm now logged in as Eva Eva typically starts her day by reviewing her notifications. Bright spot has previously supported the delivery of notifications via the Scenic CMS itself. But you can see here, Bright Spot also supports the delivery of notifications via email, text, browser and the slack. And as you can see with version, we've also added the ability to deliver notifications via Microsoft teams. Several customers have asked us to support this integration so their teams can receive notifications within Microsoft teams. So we're really excited to get to release this one out into the wild. Eva has currently set her profile to receive notifications via Microsoft teams as well as here in the CMS. I'll show you what the notifications in teams look like really quickly and here's a quick look at what the teams notifications can look like right here. We're seeing that Margo has created that assignment for Eva. Eva is ready to go ahead and get started on this assignment so she can click on it right from the notifications if she wanted to. Ava could start drafting her article right here from this assignment. But Eva is like a lot of writers, she had started writing this draft in a google doc. Obviously Ava could copy and paste her text from a google doc into the body field of an article manually. However, the CMS team here is always looking for ways to simplify the content creation step and that's why we introduced this next feature, I'll show which is the ability to import assets from a google drive. Eva will filter by google drive and locate her assets. She thinks it's this one, so she'll click on it And at this point she can get a quick preview of this asset to confirm that it's the right one. She is pretty sure it is, even knows that this is going to be an article. So she'll use the article converter if she wanted to. She could use the blog post converter and note that we've also added sheets converter for things like importing sections or text. Okay, okay, now that her draft is in the CMas Eva gets to work further fleshing it out 1st. She'll set herself as the author of this piece. Note that when she opens this up in this favorites area, Eva has selected herself as a favorite since she uses herself on all of her articles. This is another example of that new favorites feature this time in a contextual search with favorites. The idea is to put content types and assets that teams use the most front and center when they need them. Alright, David added herself as the author at this point, Eva is ready to save. So she'll do that next as she's looking at the headline, Eva recalls hearing something about a change to a the editorial team is supposed to write these just like Margot did Eva can consult the production guide and get specific direction about the fields she sees as telling her to use sentence case social update her headline. Next Eva wants to incorporate a suggested image into the body of her story. She can use the shelf for this as well, quickly locating an image that she thinks makes sense, but the context of her story, this is another great use case of why we built the shelf. It's given ava easy access to saved items and recently uploaded images so she can quickly go about building her asset without any delays. All right now, that preview has updated to show that image. Eva realizes she's not sure she's supposed to be making photo suggestions with our story. So she'll use the conversations widget to ask Margo for direction. Thank you. Using the conversations Widget Eva asks Margo about the photo choice even knows that Margo is unlikely to be online right at this minute so she can pin this comment to the top of the conversations widget to make sure Margot sees it. There are several new features supported in the conversations. Widget and version, including the ability to reply in line and include formatting images and mentions of other users in those replies and comments. The pinning is one of my favorites. So I'm highlighting that one here at this point is happy with her progress on this draft. However, before she moves it into the workflow, she wants to make sure she hasn't forgotten to do anything to do that to do that. Ava knows that she can open up the pre published actions to consult the guidance from the team on what she needs to do next. Pre published actions is what you're looking at here. This is another great new feature and writes about 4.5. You can think of pre published actions as a checklist or a set of editorial reminders or warnings on content. We can see that Ava is being reminded here to update ceo fields as well as promo and share overrides. Post published actions is designed to be highly customizable. So you can remind your team about the fields that are important to your business. Not necessarily what Eva is being reminded about here. This is just an example. In addition to pri publish actions. Version 4.5 also includes post published actions. Post published actions might be the feature that I'm most excited about. This allows teams to place an asset on the landing page right after hitting the publish button. So many users have asked us for this capability over the years and I'm really excited that we've been able to add it in version 4.5. As you can see what post publish actions does is presents users with a list of all of the possible places they might want to place an asset such as the homepage or if an asset has been associated with a section or tag a user would be able to place those here as well. So if we wanted to put this story onto the homepage, we could do that just by selecting this promo and clicking place. Now. I do want to note that with both pre and post published actions, they're designed to be triggered before and after the published step. You'll see though that I'm invoking both of them manually here via the gear, meaning users can access those tools for guidance at any point in the workflow. Alright. And with that Ava is ready to move this content into the workflow. And with that I've given a very quick overview into some of the biggest and most exciting new features in bright spot 4.5. I've shown allen our admin user creating a new editorial content type using the CMS. Um Margot, our editor has leveraged our new page editing capabilities for a faster, more intuitive creation experience experience. She's also used bright spot assignment desk to create track and manage work for her writing staff. And finally we've just watched ava our writer using collaboration tools like our new Microsoft teams and immigrations to receive notifications. And she's also used our new google doc import tool. I've shown you a lot and I'm sure you have questions. So let's go ahead and open this session up for Q and a Hi everybody. Thanks for sticking around. We've seen a lot of questions coming through the chat as the demo was happening. So I'm gonna just take them from the top um and and try to answer all of those today. Um the first one I saw pop Up was about I think the javascript classes and whether that would support PHP as well. Um and I just wanted to call out, there actually is a session dedicated to javascript classes later today. So uh for Mark, who asked that question, you may want to check out that session, but the answer to your question um is that that Js classes feature uses uh growl Vm kind of under the hood. We do have plans for looking into additional languages that it supports, which I think is a python and ruby. So no plans for support for PHP at this time but um keep it, it will keep that in mind that, you know, we've gotten that feedback today. Um Okay, so next question I saw a couple of people asking about uh plug in with a sauna, I think that came up when we were showing assignment desk and those features and that's another one where at this time there's there's no formal plan to integrate a sauna. The idea really with assignment desk was to give teams um that sort of visibility and communication in in one place. Right? We're already in the in the CMS. So what we did with assignment desk was try to give more of those planning capabilities where teams already are, so we'll take that under advisory will make a note that I was asked about here but for now, um but Simon desk is sort of designed to help with that planning needs. Okay. And if you guys have other questions keep going in the chat, they have it in front of me, I'm not able to respond to you in the chat, so I'm gonna read them off here, it looks like someone else asked if the importer works with things like one drive word, docs not yet. Um as you'll see today, we really focused on a lot of google integrations to start as far as google drive. Um We did a little bit more with google vision but again, not on the plan currently, but this is a great place for me to get feedback on what everyone's interested in, so keep it coming. Okay, let's see a couple other questions that have come through. Um someone asked if the page builder is available only on the page content type, which is a great question. Um The answer is no, it's actually available on any um any of the page landing landing page type, so if you've got a section or a tag or anything like that, um you can you can do that. Um let's see going through this. Can you add lead to a new content type? Yes, there's a couple of different ways you could do that, assuming you wanted the lead to be um you know, an image, it sort of depends on what you would want that lead to be right. If it's an image or video, you should be able to um create, you know, the rich text description and title an image as fields using the editorial content types. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so fun to see so many names that I know. Hi Greg, hi Kathy Hi Susan, um kate. Can you upload bulk, upload a group of assignments via CSP. No, that's another great product idea that I'll be writing town for future consideration. So like I said, keep them coming. Yeah um amy will there be any slides of instructions that we can use for further training within our staff? So yes, after all of these sessions there will be a download of the presentation that I shared as well as uh kind of feature description slides again, remember this is shipping in april. You can already actually go on the documentations right now and get a look at, you know, how things like um editorial content types, the read the documentation for those um and then for other things like page builder, um Teams, all of that documentation is is in progress and will be available when four or 5 ships? Oh, let's see. Yeah, melissa, will any of these features be available for Grove for customers who are interested in um these features that I'm showing today, you'll want to connect with your account manager or you're you're right spot um internal contact to figure out next steps in planning here as far as like I said this will be available in april so you have some time to sort of work out the details of of how these features will find their way into your environments. Um Brent asked what type of docs from google drive can be imported, you can actually do google docs. So we've created an article and blog uh importer for google docs. You can also import sheets to create sections, tags. The really cool thing about that one is if you have, you know, metadata description about your section and tags that can all actually be important and created um you can bulk create sections and tags as well as manage them um after import in that sheet. So if you wanted to sort of keep it up to date, keep the sheet up to date and then continue to import um you can do that as well. Mark asked about notifications via google chat, interesting um we haven't considered that but like I said, we will take a look at all this feedback and take this under consideration. Yeah, a lot of teams and box and Microsoft users out there, that's really good to know. Yes, kate, um Kate asked about exporting a list of assignments that were assigned within a specific date range or specific writer within that assignment desk dashboard, you will have the same search filtering, you know, start date, end date capabilities that you have in regular bright spot search and you can export whatever you need just like you could with, you know, articles, anything like that. All right. You guys are more coming. Okay, more votes for teams and box and Microsoft office. Well the Ryan asked beyond sections and tags will the import feature display tables and charts from google sheets? I will have to take that one back and go look the way we initially envision that that it would really be more so about creating those assets, you know, as far as the display name and sort of the text attributes. Um, so it might be helpful um let me go back and look at whether that that is supported. I'm guessing the way it currently stands. No, but we'll take a look. Okay. Right. Alright. It looks like our moderator is telling us that our next session begins here in a couple of minutes. I'll stick around for two more minutes. But if you, you know, just saw those page building features that I showed a little bit of in this session, you can see them in more detail here in a couple of minutes.